ASFE and PROSO

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ASFE and PROSO

conditions and models for interoperability

Lyons, March 2014

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Introduction (1)

• ASFE: Amore scientiae facti sunt exules

– A project focused on the time frame between

1500 and 1800, with three main targets:

1. Conduct a census of the student population of the University

(Studium) of Bologna (Onomasticon Studii Bononiensis)

2. Survey the graduates of Italian Universities (Italici Doctores)

3. Conduct a census of the foreigners undertaking academic

travels (peregrinatio academica) in Italy (Iter Italicum)

• CRR-MM University of Bologna

– As a multi-disciplinary support center, we are cooperating with the authors of ASFE to provide consulting for improving and

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Introduction (2)

• PROSO

[1]

– A conceptual reference model for storage, use, publication and sharing of prosopographic

records, presented at Heloïse 2013

– Aims to provide researchers with a common vocabulary and a conceptual organization to use while collecting, debating, sharing and modeling the data

– Has a fully documented XML serialization of the model, RNG schema included

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• Contents of this presentation

– Goals and advantage of interoperability – PROSO conceptual model proposal

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Interoperability: Advantages

• Interoperability != Loss of freedom

• Interoperability allows:

– Effective use of existing, parallel efforts

– Emergence of good practice and standards – Reduced costs, ambiguity and complexity – Makes cooperation much easier

– Enables new discoveries on the shared data, facilitating the extension of group knowledge

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Desirable Goals (1)

• Datasets should become interoperable

by adopting an agreed-upon exchange

format

• Federated search and data visualization

• Shared repository for nomenclatures of

common interest

– E.g.: an authority list or a concordance table for names of places and political entities

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Desirable Goals (2)

• Provenance tracking for every record, and

possibly every data fact

– This is in addition to source tracking

• Common and extensible vocabulary for

describing concepts and properties

• Importing, exporting and crosslinking

records

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Final, ambitious goals

• Create a web of linked open data (LOD),

expressing our data in RDF triples.

– With SPARQL endpoints (single-federated or multiple) – And an user friendly interface that could query the

data shared, tracking provenance.

– Results presented in several interactive ways.

• Enchant the public and allow domain experts

to make new and significant discoveries more easily.

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Features of PROSO

• Handles all of the common concepts

• Event driven, factoid based approach • Implementation agnostic

– XML serialization, ready for RDF & SemWeb • Lightweight: ease of implementation

• Modular and extensible architecture

• Flexibility to represent peculiarities of individual projects: highly customizable

• Reuses and references already existing models • Versatile and expressive time specification

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Main Concepts of PROSO

• Entities (Person, Place, Studium…)

– Are the concepts handled by the data supplier

• Factoids (Name, Affiliation, Kinship…)

– Are sourced assertions about 1 or more entities

• Relationship to RDF Triples (S-P-O):

– Entities are akin to subject & object resources – Factoids are akin to the predicates

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(Conceptual) Entities

• Are the elements modeling the main concepts handled by the projects we examined, like

a Person, an Office or a Study Subject.

• They are either the subject or the objects of the information provided by the data suppliers and described by the means of Factoids.

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Factoids

• They are the means used to assert that:

– the source S belives that the fact F can be

stated about subject entity E.

– This can be coupled with a set of time information T – Or express a relationship between subject entity E

and other object entities O1, O2, etc.

• They are always backed by 1+ sources • A factoid is not an absolute assertion:

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Event driven approach

• Prosopographical and biographical info

modeled as events “changing” the subject

For instance, let’s suppose we want to state the following:

This individual has held a title of “DomHerr”

(Canon) from 1545-01-19 in Augusburg,

and was born someday between the 20

and the 30 of January 1521.

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Example (XML)

<person xml:id=“EXAMPLE.001">

[…]

<changeOfSocialRelation type="officeCommission"> <office><value>Domherr</value></office>

<changeOfHealth> <birth>

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Same Example (RDF: Turtle)

ex:00001 a proso:Person ;

proso:changeOfSocialRelation _:bn-title .

# Factoids are rendered with the anonymous nodes like _:bn-title # The details of the changeOfSocialRelation factoid

_:bn-title rdfs:label "Domherr"@de , “Canon"@en ;

proso:moment "1541-12-07"^^xsd:date ;

proso:takesPlaceIn rag:places_Augsburg ;

proso:office "Domherr Mag. Art." ;

proso:source “FICTION" .

# Some information about his birth (subclass of Change of Health) ex:00001 proso:birth _:bn-health .

_:bn-health rdfs:label “birth”@en ;

proso:interval _:bn-interval .

proso:source “FICTION” .

__bn-interval proso:beginsMoment "1521-01-20"^^xsd:date ;

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Jacopo Zingoni

Area Sistemi Dipartimentali e Documentali – ASDD:

CRR-MM: Centro di Risorse per la Ricerca Multimediale

mail: [email protected]